"Brian Daley - The Starfollowers Of Coramonde" - читать интересную книгу автора (Daley Brian)

Ibn-al-Yed backed his horse away hi shock and confusion. Yardiff Bey, his
Masters and dread Amon looked back through time, at the indecision in the
newcomer's features. He wiped his forehead once, quickly, on an olive-colored
sleeve. Over his left breast pocket were cryptic letters no one there could
decipher: us ARMY. Over the right was another strip of characters, whose meaning
they would come to know: MACDONALD.
Through the eyes of the late Ibn-al-Yed, the sorcerer watched that early
disruption of his careful design. The image receded, Amon summoned up another .
..
There was revelry in Hell.
The metal war vehicle had killed Chaffinch, but events had left Gabrielle
deCourteney in the hands of Yardiff Bey. It was an occasion of tremendous
importance, enormous success. In Amon's mansion on the in-
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fernal plane, the demon's votaries writhed, ecstatic, to insane music.
Without warning the cyclopean doors burst apart in a shower of wooden splinters
and metal fragments. The armored personnel carrier revved down the center of the
room, treads chewing stone, engine bellowing above the din.
The machine's weapons cut loose, flashing ruin in all directions. Gunfire, as
Yardiff Bey was to hear it called later. The fugitive Prince Springbuck
appeared, and Andre deCourteney. Gabrielle was rescued, as explosions and
gunfire purged the chamber. Yardiff Bey had to flee, as Amon was humiliated by
mad invasion.
The sorcerer quivered, experiencing it again. No one had affronted great Amon
that way in an eternity. Now a last image . . .
Yardiff Bey sat in his own sanctum, high in the palace-fortress at Earthfast,
laboring at a spell against the intruder, MacDonald, whose interference had
persisted. Gil MacDonald of the bizarre innovations, unpredictable deceptions
and unlooked-for influence, had thrown Bey's equations out of kilter.
With this invocation, sapping MacDonald's soul from his body, Yardiff Bey would
remedy that. But he began to meet odd resistance; his enchantments were warped
and subverted. There was howling from his supernatural
servants.
An armed company appeared where the outlander's naked soul should have cringed.
Springbuck, Andre deCourteney, Van Duyn and MacDonald himself, whole, were among
them. In seconds the palace-fortress was filled with fighting and dying, crash
of alien weapons, curses of combatants and belling of sword strokes. Yardiff Bey
made his escape by a barest margin aboard his flying vessel Cloud Ruler. He'd
lost, in minutes, his iron grip on Coramonde.
The taste of that catastrophe denied his mouth once more. Then Amon let the
retelling fade.
First among sorcerers, once the Hand of Shardishku-Salama*, Bey felt his breath
heaving with terror and resentment.
"And all of that you will set right?" came the demon's challenge, on a
sepulchral wind. The sorcerer
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raised himself to hands and knees with quaking hope. But his response held only
firm conviction.
"I swear it! I have come back because I am needed. There approaches the time of
greatest effort, but greatest risk also. Let me play my part hi the Masters*